What does the response to COVID-19 tell us about our ability to cope with climate change?

People now have a better understanding of the concept of exponential growth.

Question: What does the response to COVID-19 tell us about our ability to cope with climate change?
Position‹3 of 3: We, as a society, are resilient and will be able to apply the lessons COVID-19 has taught us to tackling the climate change crisis
Argument1 of 2›: People now have a better understanding of the concept of exponential growth.

COVID-19 has spread across the globe exponentially, similar to how climate change is slowly worsening. The pandemic is helping people conceptualize and understand how slow burning crises can quickly get out of control.

The argument

The COVID-19 pandemic has made people more aware of the concept of an exponential curve, in which the rate of infection is steadily increasing similar to how the Earth’s temperature is slowly rising. One person contracting coronavirus and giving it to somebody else who then goes on to infect a third person, and so on, is an example of exponential growth. And “It’s also how climate change works. And if there’s any silver lining in this mess, it’s that the coronavirus pandemic is teaching us a valuable lesson about the perils of ignoring destructive processes—and perhaps even larger, longer-term disasters—that increase exponentially.” People often struggle to conceptualize the future catastrophic effects of climate change, because it’s entirely unprecedented and therefore difficult to understand (since we have no reference point to compare it to). To make it worse, we can not see or feel climate change, so the severity of the issue hasn't fully sunk in for us yet. But the pandemic is a great example of how little things can slowly add up, until the results are catastrophic and completely out of control. We've had past pandemics, such as H1N1 or the flu, so we understand how they work and what they look like. It took 67 days to reach 100,000 coronavirus cases worldwide. The second 100,000 cases took 11 days, and the third 100,000 took only four days. The COVID-19 pandemic might galvanize people into taking action against climate change, and help them better understand the exponential growth of harmful carbon emissions that are steadily increasing each year before it becomes too late.

Premises

[P1]The pandemic made people vividly aware of exponential growth—one infection leading to many—mirroring how climate change and rising carbon emissions accelerate. [P2] People struggle to grasp climate change because it is unprecedented and imperceptible, but COVID-19's accelerating case counts (100,000 cases in 67 days, then 11, then 4) offer a tangible model of how small changes compound into catastrophe. [C] Therefore, because people now better understand exponential growth, society is resilient and can apply COVID-19's lessons to the climate crisis.

Counter-arguments

The claim that the pandemic taught the public exponential growth is testable, and it was tested. Research on exponential-growth bias conducted during 2020 found that people systematically underestimated compounding case trajectories even while watching them unfold, and that the bias persisted after exposure — which is among the standard explanations for why early warnings were widely discounted and interventions arrived late. Living through a curve turns out not to be the same as understanding one. The analogy also misdescribes what it is being transferred to. Climate change is not exponential in the sense the argument needs: the physical relationship between cumulative emissions and warming is approximately linear, and temperature accrues gradually over decades rather than doubling on a scale of days. The discontinuities people most fear — ice-sheet collapse, permafrost feedbacks, monsoon shifts — are thresholds, which behave differently again. A public trained by case counts to expect doubling every few days has been taught a curve that does not describe the problem, and may draw the wrong inference in either direction: that nothing is happening because nothing doubled this month, or that catastrophe is weeks away. The argument then requires the lesson to persist and transfer across exactly the gap it identifies as the difficulty. Its own account is that climate change is hard to grasp because it is unprecedented, slow and imperceptible; a lesson learned from an immediate, visible, personally threatening emergency has to survive translation into a slow, diffuse and impersonal one. That transfer is asserted rather than demonstrated. And the pandemic's fuller demonstration is available to the rival positions. An emergency with a direct personal threat produced compliance that decayed within months, alongside sharp political polarisation over the measures themselves — a discouraging model for sustaining costly action over decades.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Exposure did not produce the understanding claimed: research on exponential-growth bias conducted during 2020 found people systematically underestimated compounding case trajectories even while observing them, with the bias persisting afterwards. [Rejecting P2] The analogy misdescribes the target. Warming is approximately linear in cumulative emissions and accrues gradually rather than doubling on a short timescale, with the feared discontinuities being thresholds rather than exponentials. The premise also assumes a lesson learned under an immediate, visible, personal threat will transfer to a slow and imperceptible one, which is the difficulty it identifies rather than an answer to it.